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Continuing Conjure: African-Based Spiritual Traditions in Colson Whitehead’S the Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’S Sing, Unburied, Sing

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Continuing Conjure: African-Based Spiritual Traditions in Colson Whitehead’S the Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’S Sing, Unburied, Sing religions Article Continuing Conjure: African-Based Spiritual Traditions in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing James Mellis Guttman Community College, 50 West 40th St., New York, NY 10018, USA; [email protected] Received: 10 April 2019; Accepted: 23 June 2019; Published: 26 June 2019 Abstract: In 2016 and 2017, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing both won the National Book Award for fiction, the first time that two African-American writers have won the award in consecutive years. This article argues that both novels invoke African-based spirituality in order to create literary sites of resistance both within the narrative of the respective novels, but also within American culture at large. By drawing on a tradition of authors using African-based spiritual practices, particularly Voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork, Whitehead and Ward enter and engage in a tradition of African American protest literature based on African spiritual traditions, and use these traditions variously, both as a tie to an originary African identity, but also as protection and a locus of resistance to an oppressive society. That the characters within the novels engage in African spiritual traditions as a means of locating a sense of “home” within an oppressive white world, despite the novels being set centuries apart, shows that these traditions provide a possibility for empowerment and protest and can act as a means for contemporary readers to address their own political and social concerns. Keywords: voodoo; conjure; African-American literature; protest literature; African American culture; Whitehead; Ward; American literature; popular culture And we are walking together, cause we love one another There are ghosts at our table, they are feasting tonight. –Alexandra Scott, Stranger Future scholars of African-American literature will surely note that 2016 and 2017 marked an unusual moment in American life and letters: in consecutive years, two novels by younger African-American writers were met with extraordinary critical and commercial success, including but not limited to winning the National Book Award for Fiction. Those two works were Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied Sing (2017). In being awarded the National Book Award for Fiction, Whitehead and Ward join the ranks of notable African-American authors Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1953), Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1983), and Charles Johnson (Middle Passage, 1991).1 In addition to the National Book Award, Whitehead’s fantastical tale of the escaped slave Cora’s harrowing journey northward and Ward’s road trip-cum meditation on the reaping of generational violence and racism were both showered with other, innumerable accolades. For instance, The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was named to The New York 1 Ward previously won the National Book Award for her 2011 novel Salvage the Bones, making her the first African-American author to win the award twice. Religions 2019, 10, 403; doi:10.3390/rel10070403 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2019, 10, 403 2 of 14 Times Best Books List, was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, won The Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Sing, Unburied, Sing was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in Fiction, named as one of Barack Obama’s Best Books, and selected as a Book of the Year by The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review, among other honors. An additional facet of these novels’ importance to African-American cultural and literary history, beyond their many accolades and “crossover appeal”, is recognizing that both authors draw on a long tradition of African-based spiritual traditions in African-American literature.2 Set centuries apart, these works are nevertheless similar in that they both explore the legacy and repercussions of the African diaspora and its effects, although in very different ways. In these explorations, both authors mine their own imaginations as well as practices of African-based spiritual and religious traditions as manifest in both works by earlier African-American authors and the historical record, and in doing so perpetuate a discrete tradition within African-American life and literature. They do this not only to propel their respective plots and characterizations, but also to interrogate what it means to be black in America both historically and in the present. While doing so, the novels examine the ways in which African-based spirituality and supernaturalism can serve as a locus for power, protection and protest in a racially oppressive society. Of course, there is a long and storied tradition of African-American authors using their work to protest oppression in America. From the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, to the slave narratives of Oudallah Eqiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and others, through the abolitionist essays and speeches of David Walker, Sojourner Truth and Henry Highland Garnet to the sociological work of W.E.B. Du Bois and the fiction, speeches, plays and poetry of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance to James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr., Amiri Baraka and June Jordan to the more recent work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and beyond, African-American authors have used their writing to overtly advocate, agitate, beg, demand and scream for equality. A close examination of African-American literature over the last two hundred and fifty years will show that, within this tradition of “protest” literature, there exists a second tradition of authors invoking African-based spiritual traditions variously: as a literary trope, a tie to originary African identity, and most importantly for this essay, as a means of empowerment for characters to control or punish, or as protection from and resistance to a racially oppressive society. As such, Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward are some of the most recent African-American writers whose work draws on African-based spiritual traditions resulting in literary and political sites of resistance to an oppressive, hegemonic-driven white cultural impulse. In doing so, these novels speak to a new generation looking for historical and literary models in which political and cultural resistance can be found. Many critics, and even Whitehead and Ward themselves, perhaps thinking of the fantastical elements of the two novels, have tended to refer to The Underground Railroad and Sing, Unburied, Sing as works of “magical realism”. In a New York Times profile of Whitehead, for example, Jennifer Schuessler prompts Whitehead to claim, “I went back and reread [Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s] 100 Years of Solitude and it made me think about what it would be like if I didn’t turn the dial up to 10, but kept the fantasy much more matter-of-fact” (Schuessler 2016). This reflection indicates Whitehead’s conscious decision to create the novel in the “magical realist” genre with the addition of elements and language of conjure and hoodoo that are interspersed throughout the novel. Additionally, in an interview in Nylon, Jesmyn Ward is asked, “Sing was your first foray into magical realism, how did you go about 2 “African-based spiritual traditions” refer to the practices of Voodoo, conjure, rootwork and hoodoo as practiced in the United States. Based on western African religions, these practices have been defined variously by different practitioners and scholars as they adapted from African practice to life in the Caribbean and the North American mainland, evolving into different regional and cultural practices. See Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, Yvonne Chireau, Conjure and Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: Religious Elements in African American Magic and Jeffery E. Anderson, The Voodoo Encyclopedia: Magic, Ritual and Religion, Conjure in African-American Society and Hoodoo, Voodoo and Conjure: A Handbook for more detailed definitions of the terms and how they have evolved practically and linguistically in the Americas. Religions 2019, 10, 403 3 of 14 approaching that world? Was it intimidating?” She replies, “It was definitely intimidating. I did a lot of reading about voodoo and hoodoo, and I did a lot of reading about that spiritual tradition because that’s what Mam practices. And some of that is informing Richie’s experience of the afterlife” (Bryant 2017). This response indicates that Ward, while asserting the importance of Voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork in the novel, is nevertheless subsuming these beliefs and practices within the generic characterization of magical realism put forth by the interviewer, an impulse shared by Whitehead in interviews about The Underground Railroad. I argue, then, that these characterizations of both novels lack nuance and are incomplete. Rather, it is more accurate to recognize and characterize both novels as part of the body of African-based spiritualist fiction, rather than as works of magical realism. For while “magical realism” has certainly broken free of geographical constraints and is used by authors worldwide, it is generally associated with Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Amado and Jorge Luis Borges, though African American authors like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and Charles Johnson have also written within the genre. African-based spiritual fiction is defined here as African-American realist fiction with African-based
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